Writer's Block

Wednesday September 24, 2014

So this is a test and an exercise all at once. Something to get my fingers typing and my brain working - preferably together in a shared goal of actually writing something. So write I shall. Perhaps not my best writing, but words on a virtual page nonetheless and that has got to count for something. Bear with me dear reader, this is not going to be a polished blog entry, and that’s on purpose. Sometimes, like all other writers, I have trouble writing. What an awful feeling it is! This last month was full of upheaval and included the wedding of my two best friends one of whom is the awesome web developer for this blog and other projects, Risto Keravuori. This sort of made me realize how fragile my productive streaks are - something I cannot continue to allow, mainly because I am at a sort of turning point where I’m trying to think of myself as a professional writer - a very unpaid professional writer. The cool part about my current situation though is that I love my paying job, so being unpaid as a writer is not necessarily a bad thing - in fact, on days like today when the words are not coming so easily, I reflect on how lucky I am that I’m not trying to meet a deadline or face losing my job. My deadlines are all self imposed and nobody is telling me what to write. Break out time. Time to write whatever about whatever, and this is my post about writer’s block (if that wasn’t clear from my ramblings above.) Here are some things that I’m doing to improve my writing productivity.

1)Working on two projects at once.

2)New writing platform / software. -Trying a new technique for writing using that platform.

3)Talking to myself out loud even more than I normally do.

4)This blog post.

Number one is pretty easy. I’ve had the idea for two more books kicking around in my head for a while - that is beyond the one I am currently writing. Then suddenly one of them - originally an idea for a novella, decided it wanted to become an arc of four full length novels. What the hell brain?! You won’t let me write fifty damn words to break through one section of writing on a project that is approaching 4 years of work, but you’ve decided that after I finish the current book - whenever that is - you have 500,000 more words that you want to do? The meme “scumbag brain,” comes to mind.

Well why should I not work on that project too? Part of my brain immediately rebelled. Two projects at once?! Heresy. Treason. Perhaps a bit misguided? (the softer, gentler part of my brain came up with that one.)

No! None of those things. Let’s skull this one out. Every day I sit and stare at my computer screen and nothing happens is a wasted day. A day when something could have been accomplished. Forward progress on SOMETHING could have been made. Those days make me feel like crap, and a month of those days makes me feel worthless. But if I were to write something rather than nothing - and I mean anything at all - progress will have been made.

I want to take just a moment here in the middle of this blog entry to call out Will May for showing me the - punctuation a few months ago. Apparently it has legitimate use in writing, and now that I know that I overuse and abuse it. It’s like the ellipse was in high school, but that’s a story for another time…

Ahem. Something over nothing. So I sat down and pounded out 1700 words of my next novel in a couple of hours. That’s what I’m talking about! That’s the sort of speed I’m used to enjoying… sporadically… okay, when I’m truly inspired. So what gives, why the sudden inspiration? Well, when I have ideas kicking around and I “can’t” write them down, they slow burn until they burst onto a page. That’s my method evidently, and it’s not super productive. How can I harness this to improve my productivity if that’s how my brain works? Two projects at once. Whatever I feel motivated to write, I should write. That’s the privilege of being an unpaid professional writer.

Even if I were to alternate days between my science fiction novel and my high fantasy novel (shut up,) I would increase my word count on each day, ultimately making more progress on the project I want to finish first. Brilliant!

Alright, what about bullet number two? New writing platform. I tried out Scrivener, and then purchased their product for windows. I’m not pitching anything. I wrote the first 50,000 words of my novel in Office, and certainly could have done it in Open Office. Hell, when I sat down to actually start writing the book for real - after that abomination that happened during Nanowrimo 2012 - I wrote with pen and paper for five days and got a good 6000 words down. You can use whatever you like. I just so happen to enjoy the full screen feature where the only thing you see is your current work, and it scrolls in a typewriter fashion to keep your work at the center of the screen. This, paired with using a set playlist of music (the new technique,) keeps a lot of the computer distractions down while writing. Also, there are some nifty features that have motivated me, like the document statistics function. Apparently I have written 128 pages of standard paperback format words. That’s pretty cool!

Bullet number three. This should be pretty self-explanatory. I live alone, which is probably good based on the amount I converse with myself (or make sound effects or do dialog and scenes while writing, over and over and over - hey, whatever it takes, right?) Talking out loud helps me organize my thoughts, which is good because mine are often disjointed and jump from thing to thing. Yes, I know. I was diagnosed with ADD a long time ago, thank you. I also read a description of what it’s like to be creative, and honestly, I think that writer has ADD too. Imagine having a computer with your preferred web browser open. Imagine having 1000 tabs open at once. That’s my world. Talking out loud, and having extraneous distractions minimized by things like those listed in Bullet Two, help me focus.

Finally, bullet number four. If you can’t tell, this post is pretty rough, very stream of consciousness writing, minimal editing. That’s good. This is representational for what rough draft work of anything of mine looks like, and all I wanted to do today was get words on a page and break through my writer’s block. This is a good 1200 words or so written in short order. Something over nothing. I’ve read a lot of stuff from my favorite authors who universally say that their process involves “just writing” whenever they hit a block. So here’s to being a professional, and writing.